James Harden said everyone not himself or Dwight Howard on the Rockets were role players. Chandler Parsons, now of the Dallas Mavericks, wasn’t amused by that. Two guys that had been tight in Houston suddenly were having a little back-and-forth in the media.

“We’ve been in the casinos together and everything,” Parsons said to CSNNW.com. “We talked about it and it’s in the past. We’ve been hanging out, talking. We played on the same team a few times here, which was cool to get back out there with him. There are no hard feelings.”

“There was never really any back and forth,” Harden told CSNNW.com. “I never said anything about Chandler. Chandler is in Dallas right now. I was just talking about my teammates. No matter what, if the Rockets are playing good, Dwight and James get the praise. If we’re doing bad, Dwight and James gets the bulk of criticism. The media, I guess, took another story and ran with it. Chandler and me are cool. We’re good.”

And like most feuds, once two rational people sit down and talk for a minute, everything dissipates.

Harden is right that he and Dwight Howard will get the lion’s share of blame or credit for how the Rockets do, fair or not, but he basically reiterated that everyone but him and Howard are role players. True or not, guys in the locker room don’t like to hear that.

Once the season starts Harden will get a sense of how much he will miss Parsons, that was a real threat working off him and Dwight Howard and Trevor Ariza may not be able to fill those same shoes.